 Re: VM Advice
Next time you're in your XP VM, go to the menu up top. VM -> Install VMWare tools.
It doesn't always install automatically so you may need to run the installation manually by clicking that button. 
EDIT: There's no way your RAM is the bottleneck here. I'm betting this is because VMWare tools isn't installed. XP will run perfectly smooth on a half gig of RAM. With you allocating 3.5G and leaving 4.5G for the host PC, both the VM and host PC should run seamlessly.
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